both sides now joni mitchell, 1969 - creature and...

Northern Voices Currents Picton

1

Both Sides Now Joni Mitchell, 1969

Rows and flows of angel hair

And ice cream castles in the air

And feather canyons everywhere

I've looked at clouds that way

But now they only block the sun

They rain and snow on everyone

So many things I would have done

But clouds got in my way

I've looked at clouds from both sides now

From up and down and still somehow

It's cloud's illusions I recall

I really don't know clouds at all

Moons and Junes and ferries wheels

The dizzy dancing way you feel

As every fairy tale comes real

I've looked at love that way

But now it's just another show

You leave 'em laughing when you go

And if you care, don't let them know

Don't give yourself away

I've looked at love from both sides now

From give and take and still somehow

It's love's illusions I recall

I really don't know love at all

Tears and fears and feeling proud,

To say "I love you" right out loud

Dreams and schemes and circus crowds

I've looked at life that way

But now old friends they're acting strange

They shake their heads, they say I've changed

Well something's lost, but something's gained

In living every day.


2

I've looked at life from both sides now

From win and lose and still somehow

It's life's illusions I recall

I really don't know life at all

I've looked at life from both sides now

From up and down, and still somehow

It's life's illusions I recall

I really don't know life at all

Woodstock Joni Mitchell, 1970

I came upon a child of God

He was walking along the road

And I asked him, where are you going

And this he told me

I'm going on down to Yasgur's farm

I'm going to join in a rock 'n' roll band

I'm going to camp out on the land

I'm going to try an' get my soul free

We are stardust

We are golden

And we've got to get ourselves

Back to the garden

Then can I walk beside you

I have come here to lose the smog

And I feel to be a cog in something turning

Well maybe it is just the time of year

Or maybe it's the time of man

I don't know who l am

But you know life is for learning

We are stardust

We are golden


Back to the garden


3

By the time we got to Woodstock

We were half a million strong

And everywhere there was song and celebration

And I dreamed I saw the bombers

Riding shotgun in the sky

And they were turning into butterflies

Above our nation

We are stardust

Billion year old carbon

We are golden

Caught in the devil's bargain


Back to the garden

Aleph Unit bpNichol,1973


4


5

from The Martyrology Book 1 bpNichol, 1972

from The Chronicle of Knarn

i've looked across the stars to find your eyes

they aren't there

where do you hide when the sun goes nova?

i think it's over

somewhere a poem dies

inside i hide my fears like bits of broken china

mother brought from earth

millenniums ago

i don't know where the rim ends

to look over

into the great rift

i only know i drift without you

into a blue that is not there

tangled in the memory of your hair

the city gleams in afternoon suns. the aluminum walls of

the stellar bank catch

the strange distorted faces of

the inter-galactic crowds.

i'm holding my hat in my hand

standing awkwardly at the entrance to their shrine

wishing i were near you.

were they like us? i don't know.

how did they die & how did the legend grow?

(a long time ago i thot i knew how this poem would go, how the

figures of the saints would emerge. now it's covered over by


6

my urge to write you what lines i can. the sun is dying. I've

heard them say it will go nova before the year's end. i wanted

to send you this letter (this poem) but now it's too late to

say anything, too early to have anything to send.)

i wish i could scream your name & you could hear me

out there somewhere where our lives are

we have moved beyond belief

into a moon that is no longer there

i used to love you (i think)

used to believe in the things i do

now all is useless repetition

my arms ache from not holding you

the winds blow unfeelingly across your face

& the space between us

is as long as my arm is not

the language i write is no longer spoken

my hands turn the words

clumsily

Untitled

bpNichol, 1988


7

from The Grey Islands John Steffler, 1985

scoured sky. wind

and open miles.

all morning we climb the bright

hills cresting across our course,

pitching us up, sledding us sideways

down, wallowing, walled in water.

quick. near us

and gone,

slim birds flit low, banking,

twisting, skimming the closing troughs,

and I feel it,

know it a laughing

fact: the harder your hungry eyes bite

into the world (the island cliffs pencilled

in blue haze, and there, Nels pointing:

whale spray!

huge flukes kicking at the sun), the more

you spread your arms to hug it in,

the less you mind the thought of diving under,

eyes flooded. gulping dark.

five tons of fish slippery as

pumpkin seeds on the longliner's deck,

I lift my foot high and wade

into them, feeling their bodies press

my sinking legs, stepping

on eyes and bellies, things

I usually treat so carefully.

two splitting tables ready to go,

Cyril gives me a knife and shows

how to slit the throats just

back of the gills then run the

blade down the belly seam to the tail.


8

I do this, passing the opened fish

to Ross who tries to twist their

heads off on the table's edge

the way Cyril tells him to. but

some of these fish having

necks thick as a wrist, Ross

struggles and Cyril shows him again

using his weight, using the table's

edge, until he gets it down pat.

taking the fish last, Cyril

moves his knife twice, down

one side of the spine and back with

a quick jerk, stripping the spine away

like a chain of ice,

his blade never touching the meat,

laid flat now, the white

triangular ware, the Newfoundland trade,

and he skids that into a barrel

for Pete to scrub.

the table's old wood gets

plush with blood then ridged

in grey scum and Pete sloshes

a bucket of water under our hands

and the scuppers gradually clog and we

move knee-deep in fish and blood

a thick pool washing heads and entrails

under us and blood drips from our jackets

spatters our faces and dries and

spatters our faces again, and I squeeze

my gloved hands and the fat and blood

pour out of them like gravy

and all around the air is flashing

white gulls, shrill with their crazy hunger,

wheeling, diving to fight for the floating guts.

all this life being

hacked apart, us letting


9

blood out of its envelopes,

the world suddenly seems to be all

alive, blood running inside

of us and outside of us, inside

our hands and over them, with little

between the two, a cover of skin

keeping me in or out I'm not

sure which, but some sharp

bones have gone into my hands

and some of the running blood is mine.

from Short Talks Anne Carson, 1992

Introduction

Early one morning words were missing. Before that, words

were not. Facts were, faces were. In a good story, Aristotle

tells us, everything that happens is pushed by something

else. One day someone noticed there were stars but no

words, why? I've asked a lot of people, I think it is a good

question. Three old women were bending in the fields.

What use is it to question us? they said. Well it shortly

became clear that they knew everything there is to know

about the snowy fields and the blue-green shoots and the

plant called "audacity," which poets mistake for violets. I

began to copy out everything that was said. The marks

construct an instant of nature gradually, without the

boredom of a story. I emphasize this. I will do anything to

avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime. You can never

know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives

and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement

harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.


10

Short Talk on Walking Backwards

My mother forbad us to walk backwards. That is how the

dead walk, she would say. Where did she get this idea?

Perhaps from a bad translation. The dead, after all, do not

walk backwards but they do walk behind us. They have no

lungs and cannot call out but would love for us to turn

around. They are victims of love, many of them.

Short Talk on the Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Deyman

A winter so cold that, walking on the Breestraat and you

passed from sun to shadow you could feel the difference

run down your skull like water. It was the hunger winter of

1656 when Black Jan took up with a whore named Elsje

Ottje and for a time they prospered. But one icy January

day Black Jan was observed robbing a cloth merchant's

house. He ran, fell, knifed a man and was hanged on the

twenty-seventh of January. How he fared then is no doubt

known to you: the cold weather permitted Dr. Deyman to

turn the true eye of medicine on Black Jan for three days.

One wonders if Elsje ever saw Rembrandt's painting,

which shows her love thief in violent frontal

foreshortening, so that his pure soles seem almost to touch

the chopped open cerebrum. Cut and cut deep to find the

source of the problem, Dr. Deyman is saying, as he parts

the brain to either side like hair. Sadness comes groping

out of it.

Short Talk on Who You Are

I want to know who you are. People talk about a voice

calling in the wilderness. All through the Old Testament a

voice, which is not the voice of God but which knows what

is on God's mind, is crying out. While I am waiting, you

could do me a favour. Who are you?


11

Short Talk on Afterwords

An afterword should leave the skin quickly, like an alcohol

rub. Here is an example, from Emily Tennyson's

grandmother, her complete diary entry for the day of her

wedding, May 20, 1765:

Finished Antigone, married Bishop.

My Religion Anne Carson, 1995

My religion makes no sense

and does not help me

therefore I pursue it.

When we see

how simple it would have been

we will thrash ourselves.

I had a vision

of all the people in the world

who are searching for God

massed in a room

on one side

of a partition

that looks

from the other side

(God's side)

transparent

but we are blind.

Our gestures are blind.


12

Our blind gestures continue

for some time until finally

from somewhere

on the other side of the partition there we are

looking back at them.

It is far too late.

We see how brokenly

how warily

how ill

our blind gestures

parodied

what God really wanted

(some simple thing).

The thought of it

(this simple thing)

is like a creature

let loose in a room

and battering

to get out.

It batters my soul

with its rifle butt.


13

Choral Ode to Man from Antigonick Anne Carson, 2012


14

from Land to Light On (II i) Dionne Brand, 1997

Out here, you can smell indifference driving

along, the harsh harsh happiness of winter

roads, all these roads heading nowhere, all

these roads heading their own unknowing way,

all these roads into smoke, and hoarfrost, friezed

and scrambling off in drifts, where is this

that they must go anytime, now, soon, immediately

and gasping and ending and opening in snow dust.

Quiet, quiet, earfuls, brittle, brittle ribs of ice

and the road heaving under and the day lighting up,

going on any way.

ossuary VIII Dionne Brand, 2010

Havana. Yasmine arrived one early evening,

the stem of an orange dress,

a duffle bag, limp, with no possessions

the sea assaulted the city walls,

the air,

the birds assaulted the sea

she’s not coastal,

more used to the interiors of northern cities,

not even their ancillary, tranquil green-black lakes

though nothing was ever tranquil about her,

being there out of her elemental America

unsettles her, untethers her

being alive, being human, its monotony

discomfited her anyway, the opaque nowness,

the awareness, at its primal core, of nothing


15

a temporary ache of safety,

leafed her back like unfurling fiddleheads,

she glimpsed below the obdurate seduction of Atlantic

and island shore,

when they landed, a contradiction,

a peppery drizzle, an afternoon’s soft sun

the oiled air of Havana pushed its way onto the airplane,

leavened, domestic,

the Tupelov cabin like an oven darkening bread

she was alive in this place,

missing forever from her life in the other,

a moment’s sentimentality could not find a deep home

what had been her life, what collection of events?

these then, the detonations,

the ones that led her to José Marti Airport

so first the language she would never quite learn,

though determined, where the word for her,

nevertheless, was compañera

and there she lived on rations of diction,

shortened syntax, the argot and tenses of babies,

she became allegorical, she lost metaphors, irony

in a small room so perfect she could paseo its rectangle,

in forty-four exact steps,

a room so redolent with brightness

cut in half by a fibrous bed,

made patient by the sometimish stove,

the reluctant taps, the smell of things filled with salt water

through the city’s wrecked avenidas,

she would find the Malecón, the great sea wall

of lovers and thieves, jineteras and jineteros

and there the urban sea washed anxiety from her,

her suspicious nature found,

her leather-slippered foot against a coral niche


16

no avoiding the increment of observation here,

in small places small things get their notice,

not just her new sign language

oh yesterday, you were in a green skirt,

where’s your smile today,

oh you were late to the corner on Tuesday

don’t you remember we spoke at midday,

last week near the Coppelia,

you had your faraway handbag

your cigarette eyes,

your fine-toothed comb

for grooming peacocks, anise seeds in your mouth

you asked for a little lemon water,

you had wings in your hands,

you read me a few pages from your indelible books

what makes your eyes water so,

I almost drowned in them on Friday,

let me kiss your broken back, your tobacco lips

she recalled nothing of their encounters,

but why,

so brilliant at detail usually

the green skirt, the orange dress, the errant smile,

the middays all dissolved into

three, five, ten months in Havana

one night she walks fully clothed, like Bird,

into the oily pearly of the sea’s surface,

coral and cartilage, bone and air, infrangible

and how she could walk straight out, her dress,

her bangles, her locking hair, soluble,

and how despite all she could not stay there


17

K. 219, Adagio Jan Zwicky, 1998

Now the sky above New Mexico

is hazy with Los Angeles, what words

will you invent for clarity?

Some things were always nameless:

the heart as rainbarrel,

the ear a long-stemmed glass.

The fiddle is still maple tuned with starlight,

the bow, breath with a backbone,

sweet with sap.

That long trill

is a hand that lifts your hair

a final time, sunlight, a last kiss

that knows it is the last.

And the phrase that follows:

a small voice talking to itself, how

some moments are so huge

you notice only little things:

nicks in the tabletop, the angle of a fork.

Drink. It

is what you will have

to remember:

rain's vowelless syntax,

how mathematics was an elegy,

the slenderness of trees.


18

from Eleven Paintings by Mary Pratt Diane Brebner, 1993

I Christmas Fire

I think of the wives in India consumed in

flames, the pious, or the unwanted. One

throws herself upon the pyre (because

she knows life is now not worth living).

The other is thrown, or set upon. But

each one burns, her own sweet self goes up:

in flames, in smoke. And, after Christmas,

the tinsel and paper, the packaging we

disdain, all the barriers that keep our

mysteries under wraps, everything goes

to the fire barrel. Now a second celebration

can occur: the drum, all rusty, all

lettered with ancient names, glows in the

snow, a body that burns with a life

of its own. How we feed it, all the things we

would have disappear. And it burns, it burns

the fierce light of the dying but undeparted.

III Silver Fish on Crimson Foil

This is the river of blood, the salmon run;

so ruthless, in their dark bed, the dusk years

bring to bear, upon anything, or all things

that we care to call dreams. You want to


19

believe it will be easy, clear & fluid; life

looks you straight in the eye, and you flourish.

You want to believe: if you swim like crazy

everything turns out right at the end. Now,

I ask myself: What bloody river is this? I set

my mouth (that wants to gape) stubbornly shut.

I carry on, one silver creature on the heraldic

field, companion to lions and unicorns, worthy

of shields. I carry on. Up the river I go

to my crimson foil, the river, and bed,

that I am carried on; and the blue heavens

will move, reflected in all, and the silver

fishflash of my joy will shout, and then

every good thing will be words in my mouth.

Skin Divers Anne Michaels, 1999

Under the big-top

of stars, cows drift

from enclosures, bellies brushing

the high grass, ready for their heavy

festivities. Lowland gleams like mica

in the rain. Starlight

soaks our shoes.

The seaweed field begs, the same

burlap field that in winter cracks with frost,

is splashed by the black brush

of crows. Frozen sparklers of Queen Anne's lace.


20

Because the moon feels loved, she lets our eyes

follow her across the field, stepping

from her clothes, strewn silk

glinting in furrows. Feeling loved, the moon loves

to be looked at, swimming

all night across the river.

She calls through screens,

she fingers a white slip in the night hallway,

reaches across the table for a glass.

She holds the dream fort.

Like the moon, I want to touch places

just by looking. To tell

new things at three in the morning, when we're

awake with rain or any sadness, or slendering through

reeds of sleep, surfacing to skin. In this room

where so much has happened, where love

is the clink of buttons as your shirt slides

to the floor, the rolling sound of loose change;

a book half open, clothes

half open. Again we feel

how transparent the envelope

of the body, pushed through the door

of the world. To read what's inside

we hold each other

up to the light. We hold

the ones we love or long

to be free of, carry them

into every night field, sit with them

while cows slow as ships

barely move in the distance.

Rain dripping from the awning of stars.

Waterworn, the body remembers

like a floodplain, sentiment-laden,

reclaims itself with every tide.

Memory terraces, soft as green deltas.

Or reefs and cordilleras —

gathering the world to bone.


21

The moon touches everything

into meaning, under her blind fingers,

then returns us to cerulean

aluminum dawns. Night,

a road pointing east.

Her sister, memory, browses the closet

for clothes carrying someone's shape.

She wipes her hands on an apron

stained with childhood, familiar smells

in her hair; rattles pots and pans

in the circadian kitchen.

While in the bedroom of a night field,

the moon undresses; her abandoned peignoir

floats forever down.

Memory drags possessions out on the lawn,

moves slowly through wet grass, weighed down

by moments caught in her night net, in the glistening

ether of her skirt. The air alive,

memory lifts her head and I nearly

disappear. You lift your head, a look I feel

everywhere, a tongue of a glance,

and love's this dark field, our shadow web

of voices, the carbon-paper purple

rainy dark. Memory's heavy with the jewellery

of rain, her skirt heavy with buds of mercury

congealing to ice on embroidered branches —

as she walks we hear the clacking surf

of those beautiful bones. Already love

so far beyond the body, reached only

by way of the body. Time is the alembic

that turns what we know

into mystery. Into air,

into the purple stain of sweetness.

Laburnum, wild iris, birch forest so thick

it glows at night, smells that reach us

everywhere; the alchemy that keeps us

happy on the ground, even if our arms embrace

nothing, nothing: the withdrawing

trochee of birds. We'll never achieve escape


22

velocity, might as well sink into wet

firmament, learn to stay under,

breathing through our skin.

In silver lamella, in rivers

the colour of rain. Under water, under sky;

with transparent ancient wings.

Tonight the moon traipses in bare feet,

silk stockings left behind

like pieces of river.

Our legs and arms, summer-steeped,

slapped damp

with mud and weeds.

We roll over the edge into the deep field,

rise from under rain,

from our shapes in wet grass.

Night swimmers, skin divers.

Black Sea Anne Michaels, 2017

I could almost not bear to leave

your islands at the framer

so precious that paper

the work of your hands

you chose (3/4 inch) frames, (anti-fade) glass,

we wondered which wall might

hold them all, wooden frames and

glassy sea so heavy I could barely carry

the dusk silence an n-manifold, cornerless


23

the length of you along the cliff,

the (Somerset soft white) page

of the bed, the black sea

soaking our sight

with its endless reappearance

the joining of souls seaward

The River Pilgrim: A Letter George Elliott Clarke, 1990

At eighteen, I thought the Sixhiboux wept.

Five years younger, you were lush, beautiful

Mystery; your limbs — scrolls of deep water.

Before your home, lost in roses, I swooned,

Drunken in the village of Whylah Falls,

And brought you apple blossoms you refused,

Wanting Hank Snow woodsmoke blues and dried smelts,

Wanting some milljerk's dumb, unlettered love.

That May, freights chimed xylophone tracks that rang

To Montreal. I scribbled postcard odes,

Painted le fleuve Saint-Laurent comme la Seine —

Sad watercolours for Negro exiles

In France, and dreamt Paris white with lepers,

Soft cripples who finger pawns under elms,

Drink blurry into young debauchery,

Their glasses clear with Cointreau, rain, and tears.

You hung the moon backwards, crooned crooked poems

That no voice could straighten, not even O

Who stroked guitars because he was going

To die with a bullet through his stomach.

Innocent, you curled among notes — petals

That scaled glissando from windows agape,

And remained in southwest Nova Scotia,

While I drifted, sad and tired, in the east.

I have been gone four springs. This April, pale


24

Apple blossoms blizzard. The garden flutes

E-flats of lilacs, G-sharps of lilies.

Too many years, too many years, are past....

Past the marble and pale flowers of Paris,

Past the broken, Cubist guitars of Arles,

Shelley, I am coming down through the narrows

Of the Sixhiboux River. I will write

Beforehand. Please, come out tomeet me

As far as Beulah Beach.

Everything Is Free George Elliott Clarke, 1990

Wipe away tears,

Set free your fears:

Everything is free.

Only the lonely

Need much money:

Everything is free.

Don’t try to bind

The love you find:

Everyone is free.

Your lover’s yours —

Surrender force:

Everyone is free.

The sun melts down,

Spreads gold around:

Everything is free.

The rain is spent

Lending flowers scent:

Everything is free.

The love you live,

The life you give:

Everything is free.


25

Address Book Stephen Heighton, 2005

Bad luck, it's said, to enter your own name

and numbers in the new address book.

All the same, as you slowly comb

through the old one for things to pick

out and transfer, you are tempted to coin

yourself a sparkling new address,

new name, befitting the freshness of this clean-

slating, this brisk kiss

so long to the heart-renders—every friend

you buried or let drift, those Home for the Aged

maiden relations, who never raged

against the dying of anything, and in the end

just died. An end to the casualties pressed

randomly between pages—smudged, scribbled chits

with lost names, business cards with their faded

bold-fronts of confidence, solvency. The palimpsest

time made of each page; the hypocrite it made

of you. Annie, whom you tried two years to love

because she was straight-hearted, lively, and in love

with you (but no strong-arming your cells and blood);

Mad Carl, who typed poet-to-poet squibs in the pseudo-

hickish, hectoring style of Pound, all sermonfire

and block caps, as AINT FIBRE ENOUGH HERE, BOYO,

BACK TO THE OLE FLAX FIELD ... this re a score

of your nature poems. When he finally vanished

into the far east, you didn't mind the silence.

Still, this guilt, as if it weighs in the balance,

every choice—as if each time your pen banished


26

a name it must be sensed somewhere, a ballpoint stab, hex-

needle to the heart, the treacherous

innocent no of Peter, every X

on the page a turncoat kiss....

Bad luck, it's said, to enter your own name in the new

book—as if, years on, in the next culling,

an executor will be leafing through and calling

or sending word to every name but you.

Herself, Revised Steven Heighton, 2010

There's a final bedtime when the father reads

to his daughter under the half-moon lamp.

The wolf-eyed dog sits guard on the snowy

quilt at their feet—ears pricked, head upright

like a dragon on its hoard—while the daughter's

new clock ticks on the dresser. When the father

shuts the book, neither feels in the cool sigh

cast from its pages a breath of the end—

and how can it be that this ritual

will not recur? True, this latest story

is over, Treasure Island, which held them

a dozen nights, but "the end" has arrived

this way often before. Maybe she's tired

of the rite, or waking to a sense of herself

revised? Maybe he's temporarily bored,

or unmoored, reading by duty or rote,

turning deeper inside his own concerns.

How does the end enter? There's a hinging

like a book's sewn spine in the raw matter

of time—that coded text, illegible—

and stretched too far, it goes. An innocent


27

break, the father gone one weekend or the child

sleeping at a friend's, followed by a night

or two she wants to read alone, or write,

for a change, in her new padlock journal.

She has no idea what has changed. She

can't know that the enlargement of her life

demands small death after death, and this one,

the latest, is far from last. She will not

notice this death, being so intent on life—

so implied in its stretching crewelwork

of seconds.

Some nights later, suddenly,

writing cheques or checking email, he might

notice and wonder at the change. In a sense

such minor passings pre-enact his own.

For a moment he might lay down his pen,

forget the figures, peer over the roofline

and find she was right—Orion, rising,

is more blueprint of butterfly, or bird,

than hunter. How does it enter, through what rift

or flaw? Maybe it doesn't enter at all.

It was there in every sentence: the end.

Rust Michael Crummey, 1998

The boy watches his father's hands. The faint blue line of veins rivered

across the backs, the knuckles like tiny furrowed hills on a plain. A moon

rising at the tip of each finger.

Distance. Other worlds.

They have a history the boy knows nothing of, another life they have

left behind. Twine knitted to mend the traps, the bodies of codfish opened

with a blade, the red tangle of life pulled from their bellies. Motion and

rhythms repeated to the point of thoughtlessness, map of a gone world

etched into the unconscious life of his hands by daily necessities, the

habits of generations.


28

On Saturday mornings the boy waits at the border of company property,

rides figure eights on his bicycle beside the railway tracks, watches the

door beneath the deck head for his father coming off night shift.

Late September.

His father emerges from the mill in grey work clothes, a lunch tin

cradled in the crook of one arm, his hands closeted in the pockets of a

windbreaker. They head home together, past the concrete foundation of

the Royal Stores that burned to the ground before the boy was born. Past

the hospital, the hockey rink. The air smells of the near forest and sulphur

from the ore mill and the early frost. What's left of summer is turning to

rust in the leaves of birch and maple on the hills around the town, swathes

of orange and coral like embers burning among the darkness of black

spruce and fir.

The heat of their voices snagged in nets of white cloud. Their words

flickering beneath the surface of what will be remembered, gone from the

boy's head before they reach the front door of the house on Jackson Street.

The mine will close, the town will col-lapse around them like a building

hollowed by flame.

It will be years still before the boy thinks to ask his father about that

other life, the world his hands carry with them like a barely discernable

tattoo. His body hasn't been touched yet by the sad, particular beauty of

things passing, of things about to be lost for good. Time's dark, indelible

scar.

Newfoundland Sealing Disaster Michael Crummey, 1998

Sent to the ice after white coats,

rough outfit slung on coiled rope belts,

they stooped to the slaughter: gaffed pups,

slit them free of their spotless pelts.


29

The storm came on unexpected.

Stripped clean of bearings, the watch struck

for the waiting ship and missed it.

Hovelled in darkness two nights then,

bent blindly to the sleet's raw work,

bodies muffled close for shelter,

stepping in circles like blinkered mules.

The wind jerking like a halter.

Minds turned by the cold, lured by small

comforts their stubborn hearts rehearsed,

men walked off ice floes to the arms

of phantom children, wives; of fires

laid in imaginary hearths.

Some surrendered movement and fell,

moulting warmth flensed from their faces

as the night and bitter wind doled out

their final, pitiful wages.

Chapter I for Dick Higgins

Christian Bök, 2001

Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink this pidgin script. I sing with

nihilistic witticism, disciplining signs with trifling gimmicks — impish hijinks

which highlight stick sigils. Isn't it glib? Isn't it chic? I fit childish insights within

rigid limits, writing shtick which might instill priggish misgivings in critics blind

with hindsight. I dismiss nit-picking criticism which flirts with philistinism. I bitch;

I kibitz — griping whilst criticizing dimwits, sniping whilst indicting nitwits,

dismissing simplistic thinking, in which philippic wit is still illicit.


30

Vowels Christian Bök, 2001

loveless vessels

we vow

solo love

we see

love solve loss

else we see

love sow woe

selves we woo

we lose

losses we levee

we owe

we sell

loose vows

so we love

less well

so low

so level

wolves evolve

Dark Room

Stephanie Bolster, 1998

We're here, the three of us, lit by one candle.

Dodgson's wrist dips into solutions;

he nudges a glass plate to make her be there

sooner. Standing on a box, Alice peers down—

when will she appear in the slow mirror

that is not a mirror? A flame wavers, kept far away


31

so it won't burn, kept small so it won't ruin her

development. Two faces wait above the vat

where Alice will loom little, stopped.

But not: already hair has fallen in her eyes.

He tucks it back behind her ear, flourishes

the cleaner of his hands. Now? she asks.

She tugs his cuff. They don't seem to know

I'm here, poet on the corner stool,

watching a kind of homecoming. As a child I reached

to shift myself in chemicals, wanting my image

perfect in that reddish light and tang.

But the me who darkened with such grace

was ordinary once appeared, and stayed

that way. Alice gasps as she comes into view.

He hands the bathed girl to her, dripping,

says she's lovely in those rags. She laughs—

then looks a long time at her beggar self.

Although it's dim, I think I can say with near

assurance he does not attempt

to unlatch her collar. It's time for tea.

He draws back the curtain and she leaves,

he follows. This room is long and narrow, full

of longing. Outside, cups clink. Here I steep,

emulsified. Her milky shoulders start to dry.


32

Seawolf inside its own Dorsal Fin Stephanie Bolster, 1999

I sleep in the red of my rising

arc, curled tight and finned

within fin, rocked by black

water I rock. I learn this one part

of myself, each degree

of its curve, how the water

foams against warm skin.

My fin learns me, the thing

it is part of but does not

belong to. We make each other,

my fin and myself, myself

and the taut water.

When my fin breaks the sea's skin,

through shut eyes I glimpse

wave within wave, stone

within stone, I surge

through all the layers,

my own incessant crest.

Tapestry, The Cloisters Stephanie Bolster, 2011

The unicorn made of stitches by hands by the thousands

of hours in Ghent or Bruges or possibly years.

The unicorn held in a ring of pickets

his beard and buckled collar and blood where they caught him.

All around the flowers with the names of Venetian glass

the hellebore and unbidden berries. All around a place

they went to day and night the candles straining the eyes.

Skin softened by wool the sheep in the field the wolf.

At this great distance the horn is the pinnacle

as tall as the beast is rampant its tip a single thread

squinted over an instant still flinching.

both sides now joni mitchell, 1969 - creature and...

Documents